Tag Archives: Enterprise Content Management Implementation - Page 2

Where is that tap?

Fortis records managementHere is the latest example of poor records keeping, and associated costs, as it happened last week in the area where I live – Ruptured Line not on maps: Fortis. In short – an excavator ruptured natural gas line, which resulted in evacuation of whole neighborhood, organizing and transporting residents to temporary locations, closed businesses, rerouting traffic, full presence of police, fire and rescue services. It took a while for Fortis – natural gas provider, to locate the leak and cut off the supply. Contractor was not at fault here – before digging, they checked with Fortis if there were any pipes in the area. After the fact, Fortis stated that the pipe was more than 40 years old and was not indicated on the map. I am afraid that in reality the pipe was on a map, as it was supplying gas to a building that does not exist anymore. Rather the problem was that Fortis was not able to locate the latest version of the map, and they based their excavations approval on outdated records.

The positive side of this event is that it should be fairly easy for Fortis to develop and approve business case for an improved records management system. One of the biggest problems facing implementation of information management projects is that they are always low priority, due to the intangibility of most of the benefits and risks. There is always something more important generating revenues. Documents and records management are mostly perceived as cost centers – until accidents like this happen. Fortunately in this case there was no further damage and nobody was injured. But definitely this is an opportunity to quantify the costs and risks in the business case and get the problem fixed. In this case – these will be the costs of the emergency services, evacuation, investigation, and problem rectifying and so on. Safety, Health and Environment risks will come on the top of priorities and let’s not forget about reputational risks – protecting the public trust, and the organization in litigation, would one follow. One door closes, another opens….

Is Email on its way out?

Recently I read some predictions that the email is an idea of the past and eventually is going to vanish. Although I do not agree with this statement in its entirety, there is some merit in this way of thinking. Email might soon share the same fate as the phone (not to mention epistolography – does anybody still remembers the art of writing letters?). On a forefront of this new development is Atos – I think the first organization that officially banned the use of emails replacing them with more collaborative tools. They must know what they are doing after all this organization is pretty large with 42 offices around the world and 74,000 of employees. As a matter of fact, couple of years ago I worked for a company with over 25 offices across the world and the instant messenger was our primary contact tool. With rapid eruption of social networking technologies, the near real-time collaboration and the cloud platforms, the importance of emails is going to diminish. As Atos CEO said, on average their employees were getting 200 emails per day, from that only 10% was useful, and middle managers were spending 25% of their time searching for information. From my personal experience, this sounds right.

On the other hand the social technologies bring new challenges from point of view of information management – like for example – how to treat them as records, how to deal with their retention, how to retain the knowledge. The bigger challenge however is personal productivity, if everyone is chatting with everyone; then they have no time to do any work. This type of collaboration cannot be replacement for ability to store, search, find and use the information. So information management is becoming now even more important, before the big wave hits destroying the efficiency instead of enabling it, the workers must know where to find the information, and have easy access to it, rather than trying to find it by chatting. This is the point where the email has advantage, with tools like Outlook – the search is quite simple and it is easy to associate the content with its business context. The governance has a key role to play here, on one of our recent programs we implemented a policy to block 50% of time to focus on the work that was planned, including collaborating ‘within’ the teams, and devoting the rest of the time to coordination with other teams, planning, meetings, answering emails, administrative work and so on.

Overall, no doubt – while our world is changing dramatically when it comes to communication and collaboration, our information management strategy and governance needs to adjust accordingly.

Three things that annoy me in SharePoint

No doubt about it, SharePoint is a good tool when it comes to document management and collaboration. However there is couple of problems that still do not make this product great. For example, when it comes to implementation of taxonomy and search, there are at least three things that require looking for some workarounds.

              1. Cannot delete custom content types.

Once you created a content type, that’s it, you are done – you won’t be able to delete it. Sure, there is a link in Site Settings to delete this content type; the only problem is that SharePoint will not allow you to do it. Instead, you are going to get messages that the content type is in use, even if you ensured that this content type was unlinked. There are some blog posts showing how to work around this problem, but all of them require running direct action queries on MS SQL content database. Obviously it is possible to be done, but not really feasible for production environment in most of organizations. To avoid this issue, implementation teams need to make sure that the taxonomy is tight on the paper, and then test with a pilot before production implementation.

2. Drop-off library works only with Document type items.

Drop-off library is a great concept, allowing for building set of rules that facilitate an automatic movement of documents to corresponding libraries, based on their content type. Unfortunately this works only on Document types, or your own custom types inherited from Document class. So if your customers would like to use it for images or audio files, they will have to move the files manually to their target locations. This could become confusing – for one type they can use drop off, for the others they cannot. So, when planning implementation, consider this during alignment of the end user processes, and if you still decide to benefit from this functionality, make sure that the change management team gives enough attention to it.

3. Lack of native support for indexing of PDF files.

PDF today became standard when a user wants to make document portable, light-weight and read-only. Unfortunately SharePoint 2010 indexing service currently does not support this type of files. There is couple of add-ons that could be installed, but they range in performance, quality and cost. I believe that this is such an important feature that it should be part of the out-of-the-box installation.

 Small things but make life more difficult – hopefully SharePoint 2012 will address them.

Classification or Search?

Couple of days ago, there was an interesting post by Michael Schrage where he questioned need for information classification in today’s (mostly electronic) world. I often hear same opinion from people who rely primarily on MS Outlook for storage and search of their documents. Apart from the fact that it rubs the IT administrators and record managers wrong way, there is some merit in his way of thinking. People usually get what they want – the information could be easily found and is easily accessible.

But why it is like this and is it applicable to all documents? First of all, we live in a world where information governance lies somewhere on a continuum between total ‘anarchy’ – where all documents live unorganized in one place, and a ‘tyranny’ – where every document, from the moment it is created, is classified and tracked. One side of the spectrum could be considered as for free spirited, right brain people, the other one for left brainer bureaucrats or ‘Type As’ as Schrage describes them. But reality lies somewhere in between, each of us personally leans to smaller or larger degree to one or the other end of the spectrum. My personal believe is that for us personally and as it is for organizations, to be really productive and creative, we need to balance on the edge of the chaos and tyranny.  To Schrage’s point – people quite often waste their time classifying the information that does not have to be classified. But then why do we classify in the first place? There is couple of objectives. The first one is most obvious – to easily find information, and this is what Schrage is referring to.

Not long time ago, when the documents existed only in physical form – people invented classification to locate and to find information. A good example is Dewey’s Decimal Classification system used in the libraries. First you locate books based on the class and subject, once you found it, you use index to find information within it. Electronic documents moved the limits of such system further, giving new capabilities and opportunities to search.

In case of my personal account with MS Outlook or with Twitter, Schrage is right. The value of classification of my emails for purpose of search is low. Outlook is pretty good and flexible allowing me to locate needed information fairly quickly. But why is it like this? This happens primarily because MS Outlook captures all the needed metadata describing context of the email automatically, with me spending no time on this. Sender address, date sent, received, subject, and content are searchable. Additionally the email treads functionality makes things easier to dig in deeper into messages when needed. This works so well since I am intimately familiar with my emails, and can easily recollect and associate the information with its context. But this is not going to be the same case if I inherit mailbox from someone else. Although the search might help with narrowing the results, I will need more to figure out what the message is about, and if it corresponds to what I am looking for. So, as per Schrage point – this does work for my personal productivity, but it will not help in case of an organization where I have to collaborate.

So, although I agree that classification is not needed here, and as a matter of fact it could be even restrictive, the key to success is the metadata describing the content. In case of Outlook, as I already mentioned, some of it is captured automatically. In other cases, however the metadata needs to be added, to keep the context with the content. It could be manual, but this is what most of people perceive as a ‘waste’ activity. It could be automatic, and to some degree it is possible as with MS Office documents. However, there still be some metadata that only the author could decide, as it corresponds to his or her intentions. Additionally the metadata itself could have its own classification or hierarchy to be meaningful.

So search and findability are one of the objectives of the classification. Another one, and especially important in case of organizations, is the records classification. Records should be kept for periods of time prescribed in retention schedules, usually based on document type classification. So here the classification is not going to disappear.

In summary, I agree that importance of classification will be diminishing as the technology evolvs. The automatic classification will definitely be of help but it is not there yet today. As artificial intelligence tools will become more truly ‘intelligent’ and capability of the systems will increase to analyze the content of the data, the need for manual classification will be limited. But the real purpose behind the scenes will remain – the accuracy and completeness of the metadata. Tools like Google Search or SharePoint 2010 with FAST search engine are on right track to narrow the search scope and to mine the results. Ability to use enterprise keywords, with good search analytics will help with the findability. However the need for classification will not disappear, but it will become of limited importance to most of the users.

Legal, statutory and regulatory foundation for Information Management programs

Any successful information management solution implementation requires establishing of a proper IM framework. Such framework will help with forming governance, setting up priorities, definition of constraints, and will give the overall direction to any future information programs.

The foundation of such framework is based on existing legal, statutory and regulatory requirements. Establishing of such basis, especially in larger organizations is not an easy task and requires involvement of several parties.  I made an attempt to capture some of these laws, standards and regulations used in the US and in Canada. This list is far from being exhaustive; every organization – depending on type of business – will have to establish their own baseline, which will include specific industry regulations.

United States:

Law, Statute, Regulation Short Description
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 404 and 409 – Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act SOX deals with monitoring of creation and management of financial records, as well as disclosing of information about changes in the financial conditions or operations of the organization. It affects primarily publicly traded companies including accounting and security firms, auditors and brokers.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA refers to protection of individually identifiable health information. It enforces that organizations handling such personal information notify the patients about their privacy policies.Organizations affected by this policy include health plans and health care providers.
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) COPPA requires that online content providers, working with audiences that include children must use reasonable procedures to ensure that child’s parent is included in the process.
Department of Defense 5015.2 (DoD 5015.2) DOD 5015.2 identifies requirements based on operational, legal and legislative needs that records management solutions vendors must fulfill. It affects software vendors of electronic document and records management systems. Several government offices in the US require compliance with this standard, but also some other, larger organizations implementing information management systems, often use this standard during selection process. For this purpose, this standard is often used outside of the US.
Securities Exchange Act (Sec Rule 171-3 and 17a-4) SEC act outlines requirements for data retention, classification, and accessibility for organizations involved in financial securities trade.
Gramm-Leach Bliley Act The act is regulating handling and sharing of personal information, and disclosing of privacy policy to consumers. It primarily affects financial services organizations.
IRS Rev. Proc. 97-22 This guideline includes directives for taxpayers on maintenance of financial books and records using software applications.
Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) This act regulates use of electronic records and signatures in commercial transactions.
Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) It allows consumers to request and obtain free credit report every 12 months. It also contains provisions to reduce identity theft and secure disposal of consumer information. The financial institutions are mainly affected by this act.
Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) FCRA regulates the collection, distribution, and use of consumer information, including credit information. It affects consumer credit reporting organizations.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) It guarantees access to the full or partial previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the US government.
Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA) This act requires federal agencies, where practicable, to use electronic forms, filing and signatures to conduct official business.
Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) OSHA governs occupational health and safety in the private sector and federal government.
Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) The purpose of this act is to integrate the differing State laws in matter of retention of paper records, and the validity of electronic signatures. It supports the validity of electronic contracts.

 

Canada:

Law, Statute, Regulation Short Description
Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) It governs how the private companies collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of conducting business.
Secure Electronic Signature Regulations (SOR/2005-30) These regulations stipulate how digital signatures are created and verified. It is related to Canada’s Evidence Act dealing with integrity and validity of electronic documents.
Access to Information Act Regulates access to the full or partial previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the Canadian government.
Privacy Act This act stipulates rules how the federal government must deal with personal information.
Limitations Act Limitations Act defines period of time during which legal proceedings maybe initiated, and thus influencing definitions of retention periods.
Ontario Bill 198 It provides regulations of securities issued in the province of Ontario. It roughly corresponds to Sarbanes-Oxley in the US.
Microfilm and Electronic Images as Documentary Evidence Standard This standard deals with microfilming and electronic image capture. It also describes process of establishing a program helping with ensuring document integrity, reliability and authenticity.
Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence Standard This standard delivers provisions to ensure that electronic information is trustworthy, reliable and authentic.

 

It is important to remember that the process of establishing such baseline requires deep involvement of legal department, and several business subject matter experts. Since the laws and regulations change from time to time, the organization should appoint a steward responsible for maintenance of the framework, and establish a governance model describing what to do, when such laws or regulations change.

Lost cause in records management – convenience copies

I found some interesting facts in recent poll by AIIM “Records Management Strategies – plotting the changes”. As many as 48% of respondents said that although they were concerned of leaving convenience copies of disposed records at the end of their retention period, they did not have a solution in place to address it. It sounds like a paradox, from one side organizations spend millions to implement enterprise content management systems, and on the other hand they leave on the table the key benefits from implementation of such systems and processes. In another, related question, respondents said that their strongest business drivers for ECM, were related to compliance with legislation and industry regulations (45% and 35%), reduction of storage costs (42%), sharing of knowledge (36%) and improvement of litigation performance and reduction of associated costs (35%).  By leaving the convenience copies unattended, all the above drivers are not being addressed, often deluding organisation that they achieved their key objectives. Even if the ‘official records’ are disposed, the organizations are still not compliant with laws and regulations, the storage costs are not reduced, eDiscovery costs will be high as all information will have to be searched, and often the business decisions will be based on outdated information. The missing last step in information management strategy implementation undermines the organizational efforts. This might not be surprising as over 35% of respondents cited lack of board/C level commitment and lack of cross-departmental agreement on how to manage electronic records, as the key obstacle to implement information management strategies.

The lesson learned from this is that groups responsible for implementation of information management within organizations need to work continuously on marketing of ECM and building strong business cases based on hard, measurable benefits. Even if this is done, after the implementation, there must be ongoing effort to accurately monitor the key performance indicators and success criteria. The outputs of these measurements should reinforce the marketing messages, helping in getting required support.

Transition – Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

I looked at the relationship between the concepts of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom in one of my previous posts. At the time however, I was looking from slightly different perspective. In this post I focus more on the factors that influence transition of the collected raw data into totally abstract entity as wisdom.

Concept Definition Factors contributing to transition Abstraction Level
Data Simplest representation of facts such as numbers, characters, graphics, images, sound and video. Initially in ‘raw’ format, needs to be further processed to gain meaning. Associated metadata is required to add context, describing business understanding, format, date/time, importance and others Low
Information Processed collection of data, with associated metadata describing the context. There might be various metadata dimensions allowing creating new information and its meaning based on different aggregations of facts. It is Data in a context. Identification of trends, patterns, relationships and assumption. Medium
Knowledge Awareness, understanding, familiarity, recognition of situational patterns and trends, based on synthesis of collected information that could be used achieve a business purpose. It is Information in a perspective. Acquiring of skills through experience or education. It includes perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. Medium High
Wisdom Making the best use of knowledge, acting with appropriate judgement in complex and dynamic environments, that actually achieves business purpose. Directly related to maturity but not related to how long the organization is in business. It is applied knowledge. High

 

Graphically this could be presented in form of a pyramid, with increasing maturity and abstraction level.

 

As the abstraction level increases, the concepts become much more difficult to define and describe. For example Wisdom, in contrast to Data, becomes more philosophical idea. The higher the level of abstraction, the fewer organizations could be found utilizing the concept. This is not surprising, due to direct relationship with maturity levels. However, this is the critical factor that differentiates winners from the rest. Most of organizations focus their resources on achieving immediate tactical goals. This works well in short term, but as we can usually see, such organizations survive only in friendly business environment. As soon as the market trends change, such organizations are endangered by takeovers, or breakups. Only few, are able to make such transition, although I don’t think that there are any that fully achieved the Wisdom level. Information management does not contribute directly to products or services that the organizations sell, but like a nervous system in an organism, it is critical to utilization of the available resources to their full potential. The better distribution, sharing and collaboration, the better odds of winning with innovative products, and survival.

Information Management Context – Project Manager’s View

Implementation of information management projects is quite complex in ever changing business environments. The success or failure of such initiatives is often determined by ability of the project manager to see the big picture. Quite often such projects fail because the team concentrates on technology, neglecting other aspects of the environment. Technology is obviously important, but is merely part of the whole picture. Information management projects do not exist in isolation. There are many factors that need to be taken into account during planning, but also later closely monitored during the execution. The project manager needs to be alert to any changes in the environment and be ready to adopt. Rushing ahead with a project that do not addresses business need anymore, is going to lead to disaster.

What are the key elements of the environment that need to be addressed? The answer depends on the organization itself, but usually it could be grouped into following classes:

  • Business goals, principles and trade specific practices

Direction of the business, where it is going to be in 3 to 5 years, has direct impact on definition of business needs. The information management projects need to anticipate the change that is going to occur, and make sure that delivered business systems will support these needs, and there will be flexibility to adopt these systems easily when new requirements appear. For example, when implementing taxonomy, the project manager needs to make sure that it is scalable, so the organization will not have to spend fortune to redesign the system.  Buying trade specific classification from a third party, might save time, but each organization is different so this will require customization. Ability to satisfy business needs will also impact current and future end user satisfaction.

  • Organizational structure, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders

Since every organization is different, it is not possible to use a single cookie-cutter approach. Identification of key players early in the project, and keeping them engaged during delivery is critical to success of the project. Making sure that stakeholders understand their accountabilities and responsibilities not only while the project is active, but also in the future when the delivered systems are operational, will help with establishing proper governance and change management.

  • Technology

Technology quite often introduces constraints to the project due to existing legacy systems, or decisions that were made already to standardize on specific products. However the project manager needs to anticipate change in the future in other systems generating data or consuming information. It is important that the project works closely with enterprise architects and monitor closely any other projects that are on the roadmap already. Quite often such projects introduce unexpected surprises, heavily impacting the project success. Even upgrades to existing systems might introduce need for change.

  • Corporate structure

Corporate structure changes quite frequently. Although information management systems should be independent from such structure by building taxonomy based primarily on business processes, often the corporate divisions have some independence in selection of tools and implementation of systems. Information management projects have often enterprise-wide effect, so making sure that all the involved groups are brought to the table, is extremely important. This is going to save lot of time and money in the future, when organization will try to leverage ability to mine information and knowledge.

  • Information Management practices

Depending on maturity of the organization, there might or might not be processes and practices in place already. The project manager must be aware of them before and during implementation. Also, delivery of new system has a rippling effect on overall ability to grow in such maturity, impacting governance and change management.

 

In summary, project managers implementing information management projects need to be acutely aware of the complexities of the whole environment, not only focusing narrowly on deliverables. Ultimately success of the project is not only measured by being on time, within budget and scope, but primarily by acceptance and usage after the project is delivered.

Is SharePoint records management capability sufficient?

TAB recently published results of a survey related to adoption of SharePoint.

What is not surprising, the adoption is constantly increasing. Of 730 organizations surveyed, 64% used SharePoint to some degree, from that however only 35% for records management. 55% of those who didn’t use SharePoint for RM, were considering using it in the future.

Of all of the organizations using SharePoint, 87% used it for file sharing, and 80% for document management. Only 26% however used it for integration of the metadata. I think one of the reasons might be that most of these installations were still done on SharePoint 2007, without improvements to metadata management that were introduced in 2010 version.

The surprising part however is that 55% of respondents were using, or considering using add-ons for records management rather than native features in SharePoint (Records Center or in-place records management in SharePoint 2010). Does it mean that users do not trust or find the out- of-the- box functionality insufficient? It would be interesting to find answer to this question.

Information Management Trends

Recently, while doing some research, I found in my documents a reference to an old Gartner report on knowledge workers productivity and its relationship to search. This report was from 2002 and stated that knowledge workers spent between 30 to 40% of their time searching for information, and they were less than 50% successful in their efforts. According to Kathy Harris and Regina Casonato – employees got 50 to 70% of information from other people rather than from their search results.

This referred to both electronic and physical documents. Physical documents are usually better organized, electronic often become quickly an information dump. Since then, there were new tools adopted and ratio of electronic to paper documents increased. With wide adoption of tools like SharePoint, instant messages, wireless phone texting, Tweeter and so on, there was a dramatic increase in amount of information that is being created and transmitted. Are we better now with the information management that then? I don’t think so. Although the search capabilities increased, and we use more powerful processors, full content search is still not the answer. Are we capturing more contextual information to help with targeted search? The answer is mostly – no – after seeing multiple implementations of SharePoint. Implementation of SharePoint sites became often too easy, without proper thought put into development of information architecture and governance. Very soon such installations turn into an information junkyard.

So what was the cost of lost productivity then in 2002? Assuming that average fully loaded salary of knowledge worker was about $ 80,000 per year, 30% will come to about $ 24,000 – per worker. These costs are mind blowing, especially if we take into account the success rate of less than 50%. So this raises a question – could be used in ECM business cases to support financial benefits, without accountants rejecting them as purely soft benefits? I touched on this in my previous blog post, and Jason White suggested interesting concept of using Business Intelligence tools to identify these benefits. But how to do it before we have ECM tools in place?

This relates to today’s report from Gartner on top 10 tech trends for 2012. Here are few interesting highlights relevant to information management:

–          Average teenager sends over 4,762 text messages per month – I am sure that busy executives with their Blackberries send less than this but it still shows how quickly volume of information is increasing

–          Context aware computing, using information about end user’s or object’s environment to improve quality of interaction – metadata and information architecture come to mind immediately, and its importance will be constantly growing.

–          Internet of everything with pervasive computing linking information generating input points like cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition and so on. This is not only about the information volume but also about the privacy.

–          Next generation analytics – improvement in processing power will shift the analytics from data centers to end user platforms, including mobile devices. It will empower the end users to do lot of analysis themselves.

So what this all shows? It seems that the problems from 10 years ago were still not resolved, and information management is still trying to catch-up with technology. The focus of information management will have to shift towards proactive development of agile taxonomies, automatic tools to capture and normalize metadata, facilitating targeted search, as well as making analytics tools simpler for end users. This hopefully will turn into increased knowledge worker’s productivity.